Archive for the ‘Dorset’ Category

William Bankes, the collector and all-round man of taste who created the house and collections at Kingston Lacy as we can still see them today, was in many ways a product of the Romantic era. He knew Lord Byron, he sketched Gothic architecture and he traveled around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East, picking up works of art and antiquities on the way.

Exiled from Britain because of his homosexuality, he spent his later years in that most romantic of cities, Venice, allegedly making secret trips back to Dorset to see his beloved Kingston Lacy under the cover of darkness.

We have recently been able to purchase from Lowell Libson a pair of watercolours on vellum painted by Bankes in about 1804, when he was a student at Cambridge. These pictures were once the wings of an altarpiece which Bankes created for his rooms at Trinity College, as an irreverent set-piece of neo-Gothic interior decoration.

The left-hand panel depicts a kneeling knight bearing the Bankes coat of arms, probably a medievalised self-portrait, with the words ‘Domine Labia Mea Apenies’ (Thou O Lord wilt open my lips) coming from his mouth. Above the knight hovers an angel holding a scroll reading ‘Gloria in Excelsis deo’ (Glory be God in the highest), and the scene is surmounted by the Bankes coat of arms.

The right-hand panel shows a group of cloaked and hooded mourners around a coffin covered with a pall exclaiming ‘Orate pro anima Wulie’ or pray for Wulie’s – William Bankes’s – soul. In this scene the coat of arms has been replaced by an ominous skull with the inscription ‘Non Deus est Mourton’ – God is not dead.

Although the altarpiece was clearly intended as part of an elaborate theatrical joke, which apparently included the burning of incense and the occasional chanting of services, Bankes was also using it to express the various interests and personal characteristics that would find their full flowering in the creation of Kingston Lacy. He was imaging himself as a romantic knight, he was picturing his own funeral as something out of a classic Gothic novel, he was being irreverently ‘Papist’ and borderline blasphemous, and he was indulging his love of Gothic architecture and decoration.

Reattributions of paintings by or in the style of well-known masters tend to cause a stir, as we saw in the case of the self-portrait attributed to Rembrandt at Buckland Abbey. It is no different with the recent claim that the version of Las meninas in the collection at Kingston Lacy is by Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) himself, rather than by his son-in-law Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo (1612/16-67).

The prime version of this famously enigmatic painting hangs in the Prado in Madrid. The museum has put on an important Velázquez exhibition which includes both the Prado and the Kingston Lacy Las meninas.

However, as reported in The Guardian newspaper and elsewhere, art historian Dr Matías Díaz Padrón has just given a lecture at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes in Madrid in which he reattributes the Kingston Lacy version to the master himself. He suggests that it is a first draft or sketch for the Prado version, and that the colours in both pictures are typical of the artist.

The Kingston Lacy meninas was thought to be an original Velázquez in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and its status was only changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was in the collection of Gaspar de Haro, 7th Marquess of Carpio and 2nd Duke of Montoro (1629-87, who also owned the picture by Velázquez now known as the Rokeby Venus) and was purchased and brought to Kingston Lacy by William Bankes (1786-1855).

However, the curator of the Prado show, Javier Portús, is not convinced, and more research will be needed to support this new claim. But being able seeing the two paintings in close proximity is a good start.

William Bankes, who inherited the Kingston Lacy estates in 1806, combined the different temperaments of a scholar, a connoisseur and a romantic. Between 1812 and 1820 he travelled around the Mediterranean, visiting Portugal, Spain, Egypt, Syria and Italy and collecting works of art along the way.

The early nineteenth century was a period of fierce rivalry in Egypt between the representatives of several European nations – and in particular between Britain and France – keen on obtaining the most interesting antiquities and on deciphering the hieroglyphic script.

Bankes played a part in this ‘antiquities race’ by recording inscriptions and collecting objects. The obelisk, which was the largest and most fraught of his acquisitions, had been claimed by the French Consul, but after a failed attempt during which it slid into the Nile, Bankes and his associate Giovanni Battista Belzoni managed to get their prize onto a boat and whisk it away to Alexandria.

In retrospect this frantic game of one-upmanhip seems slightly comical – a clear case of obelisk envy – but at the time it was deadly serious. At one point Belzoni was almost lynched by the Consul’s men.

In the August 2012 edition of ABC Bulletin Dr Daniele Salvoldi writes about the archive of William Bankes’s Egyptian studies. During his travels Bankes commissioned a number of artists to record almost a hundred different sites, some of which have since been lost.

In a comment on the previous postCourtney Barnes mentioned that the forlorn look of the orangery at Tyntesfield before its restoration reminded her of Miss Havisham, the tragic figure created by Charles Dickens in Great Expectations. An heiress who was jilted at the altar, Miss Havisham refused to have anything changed in her large mansion from that day onward, allowing it to decay around her.

This in turn reminded me of William Bankes (1786-1855), who created the sumptuous interiors at Kingston Lacy in Dorset: not because he tried to stop the clock, but because he was a kind of ‘anti-Havisham’, creating a beautiful house without actually being there.

Bankes was gay, and this was at a time when homosexuals were being increasingly persecuted in Britain. After one encounter too many with a guardsman in Green Park he was forced to flee the country. But he continued to develop the interiors at Kingston Lacy by sending back works of art and furnishings that he had purchased and commissioned in Italy, accompanied by detailed instructions on how they should be installed.

Bankes’s fastidious and connoisseurial imagination clearly enabled him to visualise the end result, but at that same time that imagination must have made it especially painful not being able to inhabit the actual house.

There are indications that Bankes may have visted Kingston Lacy in secret towards the end of his life, which presents yet another poignant image, of the exile returning briefly to gaze at his creation before rushing off again.

Subjects will include stately homes in the Dutch Republic, Victorian country house food, le style Rothschild at Mentmore, the collecting and display of classical sculpture, ‘foreign’ porcelain in English country houses, queer pilgrimage and the country house, the history of visiting Stowe, adultery in the country house, music in Irish country houses and showing historic interiors ‘as found’ – to name but some of them.

My own contribution will be about ‘consuming’ East Asian and the changing significance of chinoiserie in country house settings – a subject that regular readers of this blog will recognise. A full listing of all the papers as well as booking forms can be found on the Consumption and the Country House website.

The images here are all of the Kingston Lacy estate, a place transformed by the taste of a wealthy ‘super-consumer’ in the early Victorian period and which still attracts present-day consumers of beauty – and of scones.

The National Trust’s curators have been steadily working to increase the number of up-to-date online collections guides, covering those historic houses that have particularly rich holdings of pictures, sculpture, or other collections.

As part of this award one is supposed to share some stylish things. I would like to use this opportunity to show a few more images (which I hope are reasonably stylish) relating to ‘Japaneseness’ and ‘Britishness’, in response to the throughtful comments on a recent post on the subject of preconceptions.

The images in this and the earlier post are all of artefacts that have been taken out of their original context and appropriated by someone for whom they were not originally intended. In all these cases this was done lovingly and with admiration, but inevitably the meaning of the objects changed along the way, although that might not be obvious at first glance. One might call this elusive pattern of change the secret life of objects.

The Japanese artefacts at Snowshill were originally made either for the Japanese market or for the export trade. They must have been bought by a British visitor or entrepreneur, probably sold again in Britain at some point and then picked up by Charles Wade, who was continuously adding to his Aladdin’s cave at Snowshill in the 1920s and 1930s.

Wade admired Japanese objects as examples of fine craftsmanship, which he saw as being in decline in Britain. That response drove his collecting mania, which has made Snowshill what it is today. But the previous lives of these objects are interesting as well. Was the suit of armour sold by an impoverished samurai family after the abolition of the military class in 1871? Was the wind god part of the decoration of a temple, and if so why was it disposed of?

The Japanese garden at Kingston Lacy was created for Henrietta Bankes around 1910. Even though she clearly wanted a ‘genuine’ Japanese garden it was inevitably influenced by its time and place.

Furthermore, its current appearance is a recent restoration, after it had become overgrown and almost lost. It was recreated as faithfully as possibly, but inevitably the result is slightly different from the ‘original’ – which itself was a recreation on foreign soil of a Japanese original. Nevertheless these echoes, and echoes of echoes, are now part of the genius loci, the spirit of place, of Kingston Lacy.

At Hill Top Beatrix Potter preserved the old Lake District farmhouse and collected local furniture and furnishings. She played an important role in preserving parts of the Lake District, but at the same time her view was inevitably that of a well-off, philanthropically-minded outsider. Originally cottage gardens and interiors like this would not have been quite as pretty as she made them, with her artist’s eye.

We owe Beatrix Potter a great debt of gratitude, but at the same time we should not forget that her vision of the place is a particular one, coloured by her Edwardian aestheticism. Today, of course, Hill Top receives many visitors from far and wide (including from places like Japan), who know it through the illustrations in Potter’s famous children’s books, and of course they see it through a slightly different lens again. And so the secret life of objects continues.

Kingston Lacy, in Dorset, is a house full of treasures, as I touched on in a previous post. The early Victorian aesthete William Bankes was such a voracious collector that some of his acquisitions have had to remain in store.

One of these hitherto unseen objects is a large octagonal painting by Venetian artist Tintoretto (1518-1594) which is now being revealed to the public for the first time.

When the National Trust acquired Kingston Lacy in 1981 the painting was in poor condition. At that time there were many other pressing priorities at Kingston Lacy, but following successful fundraising the picture has now received full conservation treatment.

It was sent to the Hamilton Kerr Institute near Cambridge for analysis and treatment. The thick, discoloured varnish and darkened areas of earlier retouching were removed, the original canvas was strengthened and the paint losses were carefully filled in.

The Hamilton Kerr experts also carried out paint analysis, x-rays and infrared reflectography in order to help confirm that this painting is in fact by Tintoretto. Its previous grimy condition had made some experts doubt that it was by him.

However, as Tina Sitwell, the NT’s Paintings Conservation Adviser, has said, the cleaning process has revealed the sheer quality and energy characteristic of Tintoretto.

It is not known when exactly Bankes bought the picture, and its previous history is also unclear. It is first recorded at Kingston Lacy in about 1850 when it was hanging in the Dining Room, where it will now be on display again.

Mystery also surrounds the meaning of the picture. The central figure is probably Apollo, but he could also be Hymen, god of marriage. The figure holding a book and being crowned with flowers is probably a poet. Hercules hovers in the top left corner and Fortune holds a cornucopia.

But it is not clear what is actually happening. What is the significance of the gold objects under Apollo/Hymen’s feet? Why has a large die showing the number five been placed next to Fortune? What is Hercules’s role? What is the relationship between the ‘poet’ and the pale female figure on the right?

In June last year we managed to buy this portrait in pencil and watercolour of Lord Byron at Christie’s in London. It is a copy by William Leighton Leitch of a miniature by George Sanders which was formerly owned by William John Bankes (1786-1855), the owner and embellisher of Kingston Lacy in Dorset.

Bankes was an aesthete in the Romantic mould who rebuilt his ancestral home and added many splendid works of art and furnishings which he gathered on his travels. The house was originally built in 1663-5 after a design by Roger Pratt, in a style similar to Belton House. After William Bankes inherited Kingston Lacy in 1834 he employed Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament, to remodel it in historicist style.

In 1841 Bankes was caught in compromising circumstances with a soldier of the Foot Guards in London’s Green Park. His influential friends had previously managed to get similar charges dropped, but this time Bankes jumped bail and went to live in Italy. Nevertheles he continued to send his acquisitions back to Kingston Lacy, with careful instructions on how they were to be installed. There is evidence, moreover, that he made brief secret visits to the house.

Bankes’s tour de force at Kingston Lacy is the Spanish Room, which slowly came together over a number of years as the setting for his collection of Spanish paintings (which includes a Velázquez of Cardinal Camillo Massimi). The ceiling is from the Palazzo Contarini degli Scrigni and the leather wall covering came from another Palazzo Contarini, both in Venice.

The sconces and the gilded leather are another example of the use of reflective surfaces to amplify the effect of candles and fires, similar to the previously featured wallcoverings at Ham House. It is also interesting to compare the Queen’s Antechamber at Ham and the Spanish Room at Kingston Lacy in that the original Baroque decoration of the former was sensitively restored in the late nineteenth century, whereas the decoration of the latter is a romantic nineteenth-century creation using original Baroque ‘salvage’.